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(AP Photo/Evan Vucci) President Trump waves as he arrives for the National Peace Officers Memorial Service on Capitol Hill on May 15, 2018. O n every issue where America has made progress over the course of the last decade, the Trump administration is rolling back those gains with alarming speed. While it’s tempting to think of this regression as a return to an earlier time—a dirtier, more racist, more sexist, less compassionate America—it’s far worse than that. This is what authoritarianism looks like in its nascent stages. And we’re letting it happen. In the course of the last two weeks, President Donald J. Trump and members of his administration made a series of announcements that the news media necessarily address individually: the separation of parents seeking asylum from their children in detention centers, the order to cut federal funding from reproductive health clinics that even dare to utter the word “abortion,” the president’s demand that the Justice Department investigate...

(Cheriss May/Sipa USA via AP Images) Donald Trump on April 3, 2018, at the White House I f you think the point of the Trump presidency is hatred of women and people who are not white, I couldn’t blame you. The evidence appears to be ample. Just this week we heard Attorney General Jeff Sessions promise to take away the children of refugees fleeing violence in Central America who cross into the United States to seek asylum. Put mothers in detention and take away their babies. Hard to find a case more demonstrative of performative hatred. But the hate is not the point of this presidency. It’s a tool for protecting the massive looting of the public commons currently under way, and most importantly, the shady network of Russian oligarchs , U.S. billionaires , Kremlin cronies , hapless lawyers , and privately held corporations that brought Donald J. Trump to power. The U.S. billionaires and privately held corporations are in it for the looting. Some publicly traded Fortune 500 companies are...

Cheriss May/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images President Donald Trump speaks in the East Room of the White House W hen a principal of the Justice Department of the United States suggests that a gaggle of congressmen is trying to extort him, you might conclude that things are a bit unstable here in the republic. Even dangerously so. But so accustomed have we become to the teetering, it all seems to be just another shade of normal. I’m speaking, of course, of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s stern, public warning to members of the House Freedom Caucus yesterday that he would not yield to their threat to impeach him . “I can tell you that there have been people who have been making threats privately and publicly against me for quite some time,” Rosenstein said during a speaking appearance at the Newseum, in response to an audience member’s question. “I think they should understand by now that the Department of Justice is not going to get extorted. We’re going to do what’s required by...

Eliot Blondet/Abaca/Sipa USA(Sipa via AP Images United States President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump welcome President Emmanuel Macron and Mrs. Brigitte Macron of France for a state visit at The White House W hen the news becomes too much, the fashion and manners of the powerful provide a diversion. Enter Melania Trump. Enter the hat. For the first meeting of the president and first lady with the first couple of France, Melania wore a statement-making, broad-brimmed white hat. It was an unusual sight; in the modern age, the wearing of outfit-matching hats is viewed as quaint. The newspapers couldn’t get enough of it, searching for clues as to its meaning. But really, it’s not that deep, people. As befits her husband’s managerial style, Melania’s hat provided a mad distraction from the chaos surrounding his administration, not to mention the accelerating pace of the groundwork underway for the construction of an authoritarian state. News outlets were no doubt grateful...

(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) Sean Hannity in March 2016 S ince news broke on April 16 of the attorney-client relationship between Fox News star Sean Hannity and Michael Cohen, the lawyer known as the personal “fixer” for President Donald J. Trump, stories questioning Hannity’s journalistic ethics proliferate. In a moment of high courtroom drama, news of the Hannity-Cohen relationship was revealed during an appearance by Cohen before Judge Kimba Wood. Cohen’s court appearance resulted from an FBI raid on his office as part of an investigation by prosecutors for the Southern District of New York, who are zeroing in Cohen’s business dealings—particularly, it’s said, Cohen’s hush-money payment of $130,000 to an adult-film performer who says she had sexual relations with Trump. Hannity, who has large audiences for both his nightly cable television program and his daily radio show, is among the president’s most ardent defenders and, more importantly, an on-air attacker of anyone perceived to...